It is customary in the field of audience research to employ a measurement apparatus with each program receiver within each of a plurality of statistically selected locations in order to determine tuning data. Program receivers include television receivers, radio receivers, computers, and/or other devices capable of being tuned to programs that are distributed over the air, over cable systems, by way of satellites, etc. Tuning data, for example, includes the identity of the channel or station to which the program receiver is tuned and/or the identity of the program to which the program receiver is tuned.
It is further customary to provide a manual input 20 device that can be used by those audience members who are actually in an audience of a receiver to indicate their identities to the measurement apparatus. This manual input is frequently provided in the form of a Peoplemeter which not only allows each audience member to manually enter a corresponding audience member identification but also provides a visual status indicator for showing which of the audience members have indicated that they are currently in the receiver's audience. For example, this visual status indicator may comprise a plurality of selectively illuminated light emitting diodes disposed on a box placed adjacent to a receiver and within the field of view of the audience members.
The manual input device alternatively may be a battery-powered remote control or other remote device that includes a keypad and an infra-red pulse transmitter which permit an audience member to manually enter the member's identity and to transmit that identity by way of infra-red pulses to the measurement apparatus or other data collector. The measurement apparatus or other data collector also provides a visual status indication as discussed above. An exemplary remote control of this type is disclosed by Kiewit in U.S. Pat. No. 4,876,736. Still other alternative devices which collect manually entered audience member identification data and which use the receiver to indicate the currently recorded audience status are known.
The tuning data from the measurement apparatus and the audience member identities from the manual input device are commonly time stamped with the times of each tuning event and/or of each change in audience composition. The time stamped tuning and audience member records are then stored in a store and forward unit within the statistically selected location for subsequent forwarding to a data collection central office, such as on a daily or other basis.
Because audience members forget from time to time to enter their identities, it is known to prompt the audience members to manually enter their identities. However, it is well known in audience measurement that systems relying on prompting signals sent to cooperating audience members must be concerned about the frequency of those prompting signals. If a cooperating individual perceives the prompting signals as being so frequent as to be annoying, he or she may stop cooperating. On the other hand, if the prompting is too infrequent, the cooperating individual may forget to enter data at appropriate times.
McKenna et al., in U.S. Pat. No. 4,816,904, discloses an arrangement in which a prompting message is displayed on a television screen overlaid on viewer selected programming by mixing the prompting message with the video signal being sent to the display. However, McKenna et al. do not teach how to effectively regulate the prompting frequency.
Therefore, the present invention is directed to the use of tuning and/or audience response data in an adaptive prompting algorithm to select the frequency with which prompting occurs.